SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF ERNST MAYR.

Abstract

It is hard to predict what new intellectual field will next attract Ernst Mayr but, whatever it may be, his contribution is unlikely to be as great as it has been for evolutionary biology. He was one of the architects of the Synthesis (originally called the New Synthesis), now regarded as a revolution in biological thought and the basis for what has become extraordinary progress in understanding both the evolution of organisms over time and the mechanisms of their evolution. I have known Ernst Mayr since 1932, when he arrived in the United States to begin his long period of service at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). As a student, recently arrived from the mountains of Virginia, I first met Mayr in the bird department at the AMNH, where Frank M. Chapman reigned, but it was at the meetings of the Linnaean Society that I came to know him well. That society consisted of a small, eager, and thoroughly dedicated group of amateur birders. The meetings consisted mainly of reports on what the members had seen since the last meetings. One person, for example, kept us fully informed on the avian comings and goings in a cemetery in the Bronx. Some of the members were splendid field naturalists and especially interested in field identifications-what were the key differences that could be used to distinguish closely similar species. (The classical system of shooting the puzzling individual and then identifying it from the literature-tarsus 60% of wing length -had passed.) Among them, if I remember correctly, was Roger Tory Peterson, who was following this path in earnest and would produce a type of field guide that set the standard for the future. His contributions have vastly increased the number of people who can learn enough to take great joy in observing birds, flowers, seashore life, or any aspect of nature. Ernst Mayr broadened this dedicated field naturalist tradition. He introduced us to a different approach to birds-their total biology. He formed a small discussion group of Linnaean Society members to read and report on such broader subjects as bird behavior, for example. I can still remember the first topic: the classic study on the behavior of song sparrows by Margaret M. Nice, its completion encouraged in no small degree by Mayr, published by our Linnaean Society. This opened the eyes of many of us. We no longer stopped looking at a bird once we determined what the species was; we kept on looking and often observed that it did all sorts of interesting things. Years later, Ernst Mayr started another group at the AMNH that starred such informed and eager participants as Max Hecht, Karl Koopman, and Sam McDowell. Seemingly every aspect of holistic biology was considered in that forum (such meetings continue to this day but with different participants). During the 1930s, Ernst Mayr also began his association with the Zoology Department at Columbia University. He attended many of the weekly seminars and came to know the professors and graduate students. He was especially close to the cytologists Franz and Sally Schrader. At that time-the pre-Dobzhansky yearsthere was little interest in evolution at Columbia. During my undergraduate and graduate courses, the subject was mentioned only briefly and then to say only that Darwin was right and Lamarck was wrong. To be sure, James Howard McGregor's famous Zoology 2 course presented comparative vertebrate anatomy, with its aortic arches and three kinds of kidneys, as reflections of phylogeny. But soon things changed. In the fall of 1936, the famous but long dormant Jesup Lectures in the Zoology Department at Columbia started up again with Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species. This was published the following year as volume XI of the Columbia Biological Series. (The series had begun with a book about evolution: Volume I in 1894 was entitled From the Greeks to Darwin, written by Henry Fairfield Osborn). The Jesup Lectures were to play a key role in the Evolutionary Synthesis, partly because they brought Dobzhansky and Mayr together. Their contacts become close when, in 1940, Dobzhan-